Kitchen remodel, part 2

Ok, first off, Jeff built a new cabinet for the kitchen. And he did an awesome job! It was pretty darn close to what we already had. It has bookshelves on one end for all my cookbooks, too. Raising up the snack bar was very cool, it was workable surface. Which I didn't have before when it was table level high.

See, it looked pretty good. BUT we couldn't get the stains to match on it. Not only that, but we tried to restain the original cabinets. We took all the top doors down and stripped them, then restained one, and it was too dark. So, we sanded that down and restained again, and it ended up the exact color as before (which wasn't what was happening with the new cabinet).

So that was when we decided to get new cabinets.

That's me saying, "Oh. My. Gosh. I can't believe what we just did! No turning back now!!!"Yes, this is gross and disgusting. This is what it looked like underneath the sink cabinet. Eww!! We also discovered rotted subflooring that was very spongy.

And the other side of the kitchen with no cabinets. Big rat nest underneath this one. I don't think it says anything about my housekeeping skills. As I was cleaning it up, there was an old milk pickup slip from 1967 (this place used to be a dairy). So it was an OLD rat nest. Haven't seen the rat that lived there, though.

Since we had to tear out the section of subfloor, we had to get to it. And it was underneath 2 layers of linolium. It took alot of time with a hammer and crowbar getting it up.

And then a couple of sandpaper pads with the grinder. And a VERY dusty mess. Which settled on EVERYTHING.

And there were nails in the linolium. Not just the subfloor. The vinyl itself. That had to be sanded down (there were ALOT of them).


Here we had to tear out the rotted subfloor. And it came out in many, many little pieces. Many of them. And lots of nails.Once we finally got all those pieces out, we had to get every little piece of sawdust, nail, etc. out of there. That Dyson came in handy! Best vacuum I ever had, hands down.

Yay, we put a new floor in!! Nice and solid floor. We are so happy now we decided to tear out the cabinets. They weren't as well constructed as we had thought, and those around the sink were really rotten.



Last night we mudded everything. Today we painted (but I haven't taken any pictures yet). We ran out of paint. We were using what was leftover from doing the garage/now office and had enough for one coat. But decided that a second coat wouldn't hurt, so Jeff went to town to take care of that.

Tomorrow the new linolium is supposed to be installed. I'll have to move the washer and dryer out to the patio this afternoon I guess. And we hope to possibly install the upper cabinets tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

Of course, now we are getting into the busy part of the week. Shelby has a Little Dribblers basketball tourney in House, NM and has to be at the school by 6am to take the bus. Jeff will probably go with her and I'll stay here for the floor guys. Then Saturday both girls have a game in town for their city league team. Jeff has class all day. So it may be Sunday before we get to do the rest of the cabinets.

Stay tuned!!